Friday, August 17, 2012

Indigo And Sepia: Sparrows In The Sun

My favorite thing about watercolor painting
is that you think about things if you do it right.
You think about what moves you, what doesn’t move you.
And what’s important about the things that move you.
You abstract things and create a new synthesis.
Do you need an infinite palette of colors?
Do you need details, fine lines and clear boundaries?

Today I saw four birds on a sign in the Sun.
Look. I can prove it. These are the four birds I saw.

To me sparrows in the Sun always look happy.

Does it matter what kind of sign the birds are on?
I walked over and checked. It’s a parking lot sign.
Some painters might call that anecdotal detail.

To me sparrows in the Sun always look happy.

I like this image. But it isn’t a painting.

I carefully composed a foreground and background
then digitally zoomed in until artifacts
overpowered everything in the composition
then I carefully zoomed out until artifacts
and images achieved a kind of dynamic
harmony. A technological synthesis.

It’s not film grain. And it’s not pigment in water.

But it is four sparrows on a sign in the Sun.

If I painted it, it would look a lot like this.

I gave it a lot of thought. The technology
played along, indulging me, let me think with it.

I like this image a lot but to be honest
I spend a lot of time wondering if
an image create through photography
—even an image that is carefully
pre-visualized and carefully realized—
I wonder if an image derived from photography
really is comparable to painting
in any way, in any real way.

I don’t know. I wish I could
paint well enough to have created
a painting like this in a reasonable
amount of time, without many
false starts and wasted efforts.

But careful photography
lets me work in a way so similar
to the way I think I would work,
(I meaning thinking, thinking, thinking)
if I were painting that it is hard
for me to give up the conveniences
of working digitally.

The end results
—I mean the end results
I would get, or think I would get—
seem so similar that I just don’t know.

If anyone is interested, here is the
actual photograph I took and then
manipulated using Microsoft
Office Picture Manager to play with
the artifacts and composition. I
took the picture late this afternoon: